HackSpace #69

Here in the northern hemisphere, at least, the days are longer, warmer, and brighter. The great outdoors is a little greater, and it’s a time when makers traditionally emerge from their sheds, basements, and hackspaces to engage in the world. Of course, they don’t leave their tools behind. They use their maker skills to monitor, hack, and play with the world around them. This month, we’re celebrating these projects that bring together the heady days of summer and geek tech. We’re helping plants grow, spying on wildlife, and much more. Put on some sun cream and join us! ben.everard@raspberrypi.com Got a comment, question, or thought about HackSpace magazine? get in touch at hsmag.cc/hello GET IN TOUCH hackspace@raspberrypi.com hackspacemag hackspacemag ONLINE hsmag.cc…

hsmag.cc/GearedMechanicalBox Much as we adore the hand-crafted sensibilities that inform the Mythic I, the magic of 3D printing is that it can enable anyone to print objects that would be impossible for the average person to make by hand. This box, with its rotating gears opening six doors simultaneously, looks like it’s come from a video game. It’s so impractical, and so ornate, that it should hold a gemstone, or an extra life, or a portal to the next level in a game. Assembly is easy, because the parts snap-fit together, and there’s an instructional video included in the download.…

mythic.computer The Mythic I, by Keegan McNamara, is a highly unusual computer. Keegan’s gone to great lengths on his website to explain the thought processes behind its creation. Actually, thought process is the wrong phrase; philosophy is more accurate. If you’ve ever read In the Beginning…Was The Command Line by Neal Stephenson, you should expect something similar. The Mythic I is built to be the best it can be. No corners have been cut, with a body made out of carved hardwoods, stuck together with animal-hide glue and wrapped in the finest full-grain, vegetable-tanned leather. As a computer it does one thing, and one thing well – the only software on here is a non-networked text editor (as Keegan puts it in his essay on the development of the Mythic…

hsmag.cc/PCBMotor We’ve looked at Carl Bugeja’s PCB motor several times since he started work on it over five years ago. His innovation was to ditch the wrappings of copper wires that make ordinary motors too heavy, and to embed that functionality in a PCB. It’s enabled him to create brushless motors that are smaller and lighter, and he’s even branched out into the field of flexible PCBs to create different types of actuators. The latest iteration of the Bugeja PCB motor features an upgraded speed controller, enabling the tiny electromagnets to turn on and off faster than before to achieve a top speed that’s now 30,000 rpm faster than his previous model. We’re in awe of Carl’s dedication to this project, and we can’t wait to see what he comes…

hsmag.cc/Remocon The internet is full of devices that should never have been connected to it. Refrigerators, baby monitors, and even toilets are all out there on the Internet of Things (IoT), many of them still with the factory preset password. Just because we can connect something to the internet, doesn’t mean that we should. We most emphatically should connect things like this to the internet. It’s a remote-controlled rover, complete with a camera, that you can control from anywhere in the world over the internet – it’s a bit like one of Amazon’s smart doorbells, except that it’s got four wheels and you can use it to chase the dog around the house when you’re not in.…

Feast your eyes on the M.U.S.E.: the Most Unusual Sentence Extractor. Featuring a glorious 3D-printed body inspired by the Olympia Traveller de Luxe typewriter, this device was built by Brendan Charles in the hope that it would drive him to write more. It features a custom PCB for the keyboard, a 10-inch LCD screen, and a Raspberry Pi at its heart. It’s also simultaneously an ideal tool for writing documents to the cloud, as well as being the most 1960s object we’ve ever seen. Do you want to know more? We’ll be looking in depth at the process Brendan went through to create this machine in next month’s HackSpace magazine, so tune in then.  ↗ hsmag.cc/MUSE…